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Reach
Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause
Becky Robinson (Author) | Whitney Johnson (Foreword by)
Publication date: 04/19/2022
Anyone who makes the bold decision to put their ideas out into the world wants to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately, too many think it's a question of numbers-the more people you can get in front of, the better. But if people try to reach everybody, they won't really connect with anybody. To make a difference, people need to target the people who will most benefit from what they have to say.
Reach provides a clear and structured approach to creating a consistent online presence that will support the biggest possible impact for any message. Becky Robinson provides a framework and approach to carefully cultivate and grow a following by consistently providing valuable content online over time.
This is a long-term process, and the audience may be modest-but it will be eager for whatever is provided. Ultimately, it's much better to be famous to a few than meh to the many.
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Anyone who makes the bold decision to put their ideas out into the world wants to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately, too many think it's a question of numbers-the more people you can get in front of, the better. But if people try to reach everybody, they won't really connect with anybody. To make a difference, people need to target the people who will most benefit from what they have to say.
Reach provides a clear and structured approach to creating a consistent online presence that will support the biggest possible impact for any message. Becky Robinson provides a framework and approach to carefully cultivate and grow a following by consistently providing valuable content online over time.
This is a long-term process, and the audience may be modest-but it will be eager for whatever is provided. Ultimately, it's much better to be famous to a few than meh to the many.
chapter 1
Evaluating Your Current Approach to Building Traction for Your Message
“Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.” This was the title of a Facebook group Germanotta’s classmates at New York University started. Lady Gaga’s peers disdained her audacious dreams.1 A few years later, in 2010, Lady Gaga gave an interview to reporter Neil McCormick, who described her rise to fame as rapid, inexorable, and global. She told him, “I have always been an artist. And I’ve always been famous, you just didn’t know it yet.”2
Lady Gaga’s story is not a common one. Her achievement of catapulting from coffeehouse gigs to worldwide best-selling artist status—she has won Grammys, Golden Globes, and an Academy Award, among other accolades and recognition—is unduplicated. And Lady Gaga didn’t have a wealthy family, famous parents, or other support to buoy her talent. Instead, hard work and unique talent, extreme focus, and flamboyant costumes all contributed to her rise to fame. As the artist told McCormick, “There’s a real art to fame.”
To rise from obscurity to renown requires the perfect alignment of many factors: talent, hard work, great timing, a message or product with wide appeal, and a little bit of fairy dust.
If you are prolific enough and well known enough, you don’t need to work to have your online presence match your offline contribution. The world will do the work for you. People who live public lives show up online through the efforts of others.
If you are not among those famous few, you will need to curate and cultivate your own story online in order to create meaning, impact, and reach over time.
Those of us who don’t aspire to rock-star status and are seeking a different kind of renown for our work need to realize that there is no easy path to gaining traction for our book, business, cause, or message. Hard work as a precursor to influence and significance is an unavoidable reality.
You will need to curate and cultivate your own story online in order to create meaning, impact, and reach over time.
Closing the Influence Gap
In my work with clients over the years, I’ve identified a significant gap that even very successful people must overcome to create reach. It’s the difference between how a person shows up online and how they show up offline.
Most people naturally invest more time, energy, and resources in their offline lives. However, an exclusive focus on offline life will almost always limit reach.
The only way to create the biggest reach possible for your work is to grow your contributions online and offline simultaneously. Whatever you do, do it out loud, sharing the story of your work publicly so people can learn and benefit from your work even if they don’t know you offline. Those who are on a journey with the goal of creating more impact need to maximize both their offline contributions and their online presence over time to reach more people. They need to share the value of their work both online and offline.
Categories of Online Presence
During my twelve years of working with people to increase the reach of their messages, I’ve identified four levels of expertise related to creating an online presence. Figure 3 illustrates these four levels. Each circle includes a globe icon (representing offline influence) and a computer screen icon (representing online influence).
Someone who has neither online nor offline influence is a beginner. Note that in the beginner circle of figure 3, both the globe icon and the computer screen icon are marked with an X, which indicates that both online and offline influence are absent. Someone who has influence online but not offline is a master of branding. In this circle, the globe icon is marked with an X, indicating that people in this category do not have offline influence. Someone who has offline influence that is not fully represented online is a traditional thought leader. In this circle, the icon for online influence is marked with an X. The fourth circle depicts true reach experts, the people who show up online in the same powerful way that they show up in real life. People in this group are positioned to create the biggest possible audience and lasting impact for their work.
FIGURE 3. Levels of Influence
The Beginner
If you are at the start of your career or at the start of creating traction for an idea, message, book, or cause, you likely are in the category of beginner. You could also call yourself a beginning beginner. You have neither recognition offline nor impact online . . . yet. You’re figuring out your brand position in life or figuring out your career journey. Or you’ve been in a career and you’re making a switch but have little experience related to your aspirations.
There’s no shame in being here. Instead of being overwhelmed about all that lies ahead, be inspired by the vision of what you can accomplish. There’s nowhere to go but up from here. Throughout the book, I’ll give you suggestions about how to start. Patience will be helpful on this journey, since starting to grow influence online is like planting a tree; it may be years before you enjoy the shade.
Everyone who is starting something new is in this group. In 2009, when I joined Facebook for the first time, I was in this category. I had stepped out of a job in a nonprofit organization when I had my first child in 2001. I didn’t have a specific career vision and I didn’t have any expertise to add to a topic or to a vision of where I could contribute. Even though I was approaching age 40, it would not have been a stretch to call me a beginning beginner.
It can be humbling to be in this place. After I started to take some freelance writing gigs, one of my clients approached me and asked me to write a leadership blog in support of the university’s online leadership degree programs. He framed the request like this: “How would you feel about writing a blog about a topic you know nothing about?” The topic? Leadership.
I remember feeling annoyed. I told my client about my role as president of our condo association, the preschool co-op I had started, and the church I had partnered with my husband to start. “I know about leadership,” I told him. But I really didn’t. I had to start at the beginning. I had neither expertise to offer in the real world nor anything meaningful to say online. I had to work to create both at the same time.
As a beginner who wants to create lasting legacy for your work, it is critical that you first consider the four commitments of reach. You’ll need to adopt a discovery-driven approach to creating value.
DISCOVER YOUR VALUE
After I entered online spaces in 2009, I acquired more learning about leadership by teaching one semester of undergraduate courses in leadership for an online program. This short stint gave me some additional credibility, but only a thin veneer.
Along the way, I began experimenting with and learning about social media marketing. In my freelance work for the university, I started and grew a Twitter account, then started managing Facebook pages. At the time, we were all learning about social media together and I learned a lot by exploration and experimentation. Increasing my expertise about social media proved to be much easier than increasing my learning about leadership. I had so much catching up to do about being a leader.
When I started my own blog in 2010, my path as a digital marketing professional was still not yet clear. I envisioned writing about several topics: leadership, relational connections, and social media.
I had to experiment with topics in my online writing and posting until I had enough experience to see the path forward. I discovered along the way what topics excited me, what topics interested the people who read my work, and where I could make my most meaningful contribution, including how I could carve out a profitable and purposeful business.
Newcomers in online spaces can experiment with content first. They can learn from experience to clarify and hone in on how they can best contribute value.
ADD CONSISTENCY
It will be impossible to create significance offline or online without consistency. Once you’ve identified how you will bring value, start contributing it consistently. So many people who start to build an online presence give up before they have a chance to break through to widespread success.
SETTLE IN
As you are getting started, patience is imperative. Without patience, you will not sustain your contributions long enough to create reach.
Humility at the start may give you some early momentum. If you are just getting started, own it. Tell people “I’m new here. I’m just getting started.”
When I started blogging about leadership in 2009, I spent a lot of time seeking out other leadership bloggers. Early on, I developed a friendship with several bloggers who’d been on the scene longer than me. I soon discovered that most of them had significantly more expertise than I did that added credibility to their contributions on leadership. I asked a lot of questions. I listened to and acted on their advice.
While I was establishing my brand, I had to ask for help—often. I remember an early win in May 2009. The blog I wrote at the time had been going for a few months. I decided to reach out to Dan McCarthy, blogger at Great Leadership by Dan, to ask him to host a guest article. When he responded favorably, I danced and shrieked around my house. I had no idea how these humble beginnings would lead to my discovery of a powerful new career.
When you are just getting started and can ask for help and humbly learn from others, you can fuel ongoing collaborative relationships. People will want to be helpful and will appreciate the opportunity to guide your journey. Starting strong will increase your chances of sticking around long enough to make an impact.
BE GENEROUS
One of the benefits of being a beginning beginner is that you are probably showing up in online spaces without an urgent agenda apart from learning and contributing. Because of this, you may have more time, energy, and willingness to promote others and their work. As a newcomer to online conversations on a certain topic, you can attract attention by amplifying the work and ideas of other people.
In this beginning stage and throughout your journey, be as generous as you can. Link to other people’s work, quote other people, participate in promoting others’ books or causes, write reviews of people’s books. If you’ve learned from someone, acknowledge their contribution. If you admire someone, shout it out.
Masters of Branding
It’s possible to build massive traction for your online presence without any substance behind your work, but any success that does not have value to support your brand will be short lived.
If you have achieved online reach before you’ve created depth in your content and vision, you can continue to fuel your online presence while you develop your ideas.
Often people who have online success without the offline significance to back up their online presence flare and then fizzle. Masters of branding may quickly grow a following or they may buy followers. They may look amazing on the level of surface metrics—the number of followers, fans, and likes they get. They may fill their feeds with beautiful photographs and messages that aren’t clearly related to a core message.
To create impact, you have to bring substance, not superficiality. It’s impossible to offer something meaningful if your work lacks meaning. I’m sure you can quickly think of people who are focused more on making money than on creating meaning. If you have a negative view of these people, it is likely because of their inauthenticity.
You probably bought this book because you have a real message to share and are motivated to offer value. You are in no danger of becoming a master of branding.
Traditional Thought Leaders
Many of the people I work with are traditional thought leaders. These are people who have created value through their books, their businesses, their ideas, or their messages but have not yet worked to build a significant online presence.
This is often because their contributions predate the internet. They began their contributions at a time when people gained traction for their ideas through the traditional modes of publishing, speaking, teaching, traveling, and gaining exposure in major media.
Traditional thought leaders may have great reach in organizations, institutions, and communities where they are well known for their contributions, but they may not have an online presence commensurate with their knowledge. They have not translated their offline reach into a similarly far-reaching online presence.
People who are traditional thought leaders are still contributing value to the world through their work. Below I highlight three generations of people who face the biggest challenges in replicating their offline success through their online presence. These three generations represent people who are now 44 and older; the generations who didn’t grow up with digital tools. They may have been able to achieve great success and add tremendous value without creating thriving online communities.
While these generations may not need to invest in an online presence to achieve their goals, choosing not to show up online is a decision to limit their reach and influence. Investing in online presence can create greater reach for books, businesses, messages, or causes for people of any age.
LEGACY THOUGHT LEADERS
If you are age 75 or older, you may be in the legacy phase of your thought leadership and influence building. You may be publishing and contributing into your 80s and 90s.
If you Google the names of people in the legacy phase of their thought leadership, you may find a Wikipedia page or links to journal articles. You will find their books for sale on Amazon. You may find a website that they own, but it may not tell the whole story of their lives and contributions.
Bev Kaye’s Story
Bev Kaye published her first book in 1982 with Prentice-Hall. Between that time and now, she’s published five more books, most of which have been translated into other languages and reprinted in multiple editions, including the latest release of her 1999 book Love ’Em or Lose ’Em: Getting Good People to Stay, which is now in its sixth edition and has sold more than 800,000 copies worldwide.
For most of her career, Kaye relied on the strength of her in-person presence as a speaker, trainer, and consultant to expand the reach of her ideas and create opportunities for her business. For her, marketing each book meant showing up in the places where her readers gathered, including the annual conferences of the Association for Talent Development and the Society of Human Resource Management. “I marketed myself by being seen in a lot of places,” she says. For Kaye, the priority of her in-person reputation has always superseded her online presence.
Kaye, who in 2021 is in her late 70s, continues to work with organizations as “a guide on the side and a sage on the stage.” While she sees the importance of showing up online, she’s still not comfortable using social media tools and relies on her staff to support her online presence.
“I am certainly turned on and tuned in to this work. And you know, by luck, I chose topics that have been evergreen for decades,” Kaye shared. “They’ve morphed and they’ve changed. But the need for us to help people grow careers is still bigger than ever. And the need for people to be engaged and retained is as big as it ever was, if not more so. So I am getting blogs out and tweets out so this work can continue to spread in the world.”3
BABY BOOMER THOUGHT LEADERS
People who were born in the period 1945 to 1964 may also have offline influence that outpaces their online presence. They may have been slow to adopt new technologies and adapt to reaching audiences online. They may be more comfortable picking up the phone than they are sending an email newsletter. They may have a strong preference for in-person, face-to-face meetings rather than virtual events.
These folks may still be in the midst of their full-time working years or could be moving toward retirement.
These thought leaders need to consider how enhancing their online presence will help them reach wider audiences for their messages while contributing to their overall success.
Ralph and Rich Brandt’s Story
When I first met Ralph and Rich Brandt, twin brothers who co-founded RDR Group (rdrgroup.com), an organization that provides training on topics such as workplace harassment and diversity and inclusion, their goal was to grow their business to involve the next generation of their families. Rich hoped to involve his son, Adam, and Ralph hoped to continue a steady business so his daughters, Heidi and Cassi, whom he had already involved as trainers in RDR Group, could continue to provide valuable services to employers and organizations in the future.
RDR’s past strategy for client acquisition involved calling possible client organizations. As that approach became increasingly ineffective, Ralph and Rich knew they needed to invest in building their brand online by converting their website from a virtual brochure to a dynamic resource where employers and directors of organizations could discover the value RDR offers.
RDR’s shift to showing up online in more powerful ways came at a perfect time. When their in-person training business came to a screeching halt with the arrival of the Coronavirus, the team already had a vision for how to deliver their work virtually. One year after the advent of changes due to COVID, RDR Group had grown to the point where Adam Brandt could join RDR Group full time. The RDR Group story is evidence of the power of showing up online to increase the reach and success of a business.
MILES TO GO (GENERATION X)
Gen Xers grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Some members of this generation entered the workforce before the widespread use of email, the internet, and other digital tools. Most are in the middle of their career and have miles to go on their career journeys and no plans to retire yet. Many are active on social media and are comfortable with technology even if they are not effectively leveraging these tools to expand their reach.
Many members of this generation may fall into the category of traditional thought leaders because they have focused on their offline careers at the expense of their online footprint. They may also have poured energy into growing the brand of their company or their employer instead of their personal brands. As a result, they have created great traction for the messages of their organizations online but have difficulty translating that reach once they leave the organization. I worked with a Gen Xer who exited her investor-backed start-up and realized that while her former company still had huge reach through its website and online presence, she was struggling to market her book because she had not built her own brand identity apart from that of her company.
Karin Hurt’s Story
Karin Hurt (letsgrowleaders.com) is the coauthor with David Dye of Winning Well (2016) and Courageous Cultures (2020) and the CEO of Let’s Grow Leaders. Hurt is a Gen Xer who spent the 1990s, the early part of her career, growing a solid reputation offline as a business leader and executive at Verizon Wireless. When I met Hurt in 2012, she had just begun blogging about leadership and bringing her extensive knowledge and experience to online spaces. Prior to building her brand online, Hurt fit into the category of a traditional thought leader. Now she is a true expert both online and offline. Here’s a glimpse into how she made the transition.
Hurt started blogging while she was still an active executive who oversaw 10,000 people in seven different companies that Verizon Wireless outsourced to. While working with call center staff, Karin noticed herself telling the same stories. She decided to put advice into blog posts and invite her colleagues to read the blog. “What I did not really anticipate is that it would start to really get momentum outside of that small space,” Hurt told me. “I wasn’t really concerned about how to build a big online brand [at first] and I was surprised when I started to get traction.”
The number of page views of Hurt’s content increased and a community of people began to show up to read her work and make comments and share her posts. She landed on some “best of” lists and began to get requests to speak and questions about when her first book would be ready.
“It’s been a long journey. I’ve learned a lot along the way. But it was super helpful to have a strategic approach to building the brand.” For Hurt, the strategic approach included self-publishing her first book so she would have a story to attract media. This grew the reach of her brand. It also included a consistent commitment to creating valuable content. “I have been blogging consistently, multiple times a week, since 2012. I blogged for two years before leaving Verizon. We continue because we know that 80 percent of our business comes from content marketing.”
Hurt successfully transitioned from a traditional thought leader as an executive at Verizon Wireless to a widely recognized thought leader both online and offline and the owner of a successful training and speaking business. She is often asked to talk about how she achieved this. “A lot of times we’ll talk to people and they’ll ask what I did. When I tell them I’ve been blogging since 2012, every week consistently, they tell me they don’t want to do that. I think you’re the first one that said to me, ‘You’ve got to show up consistently.’ And that was really, really good advice.”4
True Reach Experts
When you have successfully closed the gap between your offline expertise and your online presence, you will have created the possibility for the greatest reach for your book, business, message, or cause. People whose online presence matches their significant offline accomplishments are true reach experts.
Although the line between traditional thought leaders and true experts is not clearly delineated, a few key commitments define true reach expert status.
True reach experts show up consistently online over time and add value with their core topic areas. It’s not possible to create a podcast with three episodes or a blog with a half a dozen posts and expect to have instant reach. Instead, your online presence requires the same level of commitment that you have made to your offline career. You obviously won’t spend the same amount of time cultivating your online presence as you do contributing to your offline work life, but you do need to show up regularly. The longer you work somewhere, the more likely it is that you will be recognized for your contribution. The same applies online. When you cultivate your online presence with the same long-term view and commitment as you devote to your career, you’ll become a true reach expert.
True reach experts maintain a carefully curated, current, and complete online presence. One of the gaps legacy thought leaders might have in their online presence is that information about them online is not curated or well organized and may not be up to date.
Legacy thought leaders who want to obtain true reach expert status will invest in building one website as the center of their online footprint. This website will curate information and resources about their contributions to their field, preferably on a named domain (yourname. com) so that they control and shape the presentation of their thought leadership ideas in a powerful way that is easy to access.
Now It’s Your Turn
As you’ve been reading, you’ve likely been evaluating your own reach in the world. Which is stronger, your online presence or your offline experience? Where have you invested your energy so far?
Whether you are a beginning beginner as I was in 2009 or a traditional thought leader with decades of contributions offline, you will create the biggest audience and most lasting impact with your work if you choose to close the gap between who you are offline and who you are online by showing up with consistent value on your core topics.
Are you ready to get started?
FOR REFLECTION
This chapter introduced four categories of online presence: beginners, masters of branding, traditional thought leaders, and true reach experts.
• Which group are you in?
• If you aspire to true reach expert status, where do you need to develop?
• If you are a traditional thought leader in the legacy-building generation, what is compelling you to invest in your online presence?
• If you are a member of a younger generation of traditional thought leaders, what concerns do you have about creating your online presence?
• Which story most resonated with you?
Additional Resources
Listen to my conversations with Bev Kaye and Karin Hurt, use an online tool to discover which influence group you are currently part of, and identify next steps to help you increase your influence by closing the gap between your offline accomplishments and your online presence.
